Tag Archives: Medianet

In a bleak advertising scenario, Indian magazines have been pushed into running cheap and ugly advertisements, advertorials, and other intrusions dressed up as thinly disguised “innovations”, like a bit of editorial here for an ad elsewhere, to keep the ship afloat.

The latest issue of the “newspaper” (as the magazine calls itself) has eight pages of a Tamil Nadu government ad heralding the achievements of two years of chief minister Jayalalitha‘s rule.

And, presto, there is a one-and-a-half page story on Tamil Nadu preceding it.

Headlined “A successful show begins to pall“, the Economist calls the state “one of India’s great success stories”, a “consistent economic performer” and “one of India’s most prosperous states”. An accompanying box titled “Lights, camera, election” dwells on why so many Tamil politicians are former film stars.

All very valid observations, no doubt, but all very old hat (the Economist was first published in September 1843).

Thankfully, the piece has enough caveats to blunt any accusations of doing what the adperson ordered.

It calls Jayalalitha a “Brahmin starlet turned autocrat” who has faced several corruption charges; it labels her co-star Cho Ramaswamy as one who “both seduced and murdered her on stage”; it talks of the endemic graft and Jayalalitha’s penchant for filing defamation cases against her critics.

Still, you are left wondering: would the Economist have suddenly looked at Tamil Nadu’s miracles if it weren’t for the ad?

Conversely, was The Economist correspondent doing a critical journalistic piece and the Tamil Nadu information and public relations directorate heard of it and decided to push in an ad (which was published in all newspapers on May 16)?

In turn, Zee says it will sue Jindal Steel for Rs 150 crore for defaming the network by holding a press conference, releasing a CD containing video evidence of the reverse-sting, and making allegations of extortion against it and its editorial staff.

Meanwhile, The Times of India group, whose business paper The Economic Times and its advertorial supplements like Bombay Times and Delhi Times, were happily mentioned in passing by Chaudhary and Ahluwalia as indulging in “paid news” in the Jindal “reverse-sting” says Zee will hear from them.

Not surprisingly, Times CEO Ravi Dhariwal was on the mat at a CII event on Monday, with Amit Khanna of Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Entertainment saying his company had been asked to approach Medianet by TOI for coverage of an film festival.

The last bit of news, published in the gossip column of the Indian Express on Tuesday, has been happily reproduced by First Post, whose parent organisation TV 18 is now part of the Mukesh Ambani group, as evidence of the “media-corporate war”.

Unbelievable as it may sound, residents of the town of Mudhol in North Karnataka observed a bandh (shutdown) on Tuesday, September 20, to protest “blackmail journalism” and the growing number of imposters masquerading as journalists to extort money.

According to a report in the Kannada daily Praja Vani, the bandh in the town of 100,000 residents was a “complete success”.

Shops and business establishments downed their shutters for a few hours, and vehicles were off the roads.

The protestors included politicians, farmers, even journalists, and a host of other organisations. They marched to the tahsildar‘s office and presented a memorandum.

One protestor slammed weekly newspapers for bringing a bad name to the entire profession, and another targetted the misuse of the right to information (RTI) Act to ferret out information that was later used for extortion.

The more-than-just-a-neutral-observer position taken by sections of the media on the Anna Hazare agitation has clearly begun to rile politicians, and at least two of them cutting across party lines have argued in the last couple of days that the media too must be brought under the purview of the proposed anti-corruption legislation.

According to a report in The Hindu, Khurshid asked Headlines Today executive editor Rahul Kanwal as to why media corruption should not be investigated under the Team Anna version of the Lokpal bill.

“Do I need to go back to the Niira Radia tapes? Now you are asking why the government has not investigated. If we go ahead with the investigation, we would be accused of being insensitive. If we do, there would be a mass moment for the media.”

Exhibit B: Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Again, according to a report in The Hindu, Mulayam’s demand that the media also be brought under the Lokpal was met with thumping of desks by his colleagues.

“We [Samajwadi Party] suffered in the hands of media [during the polls],” he said during a debate on corruption. Even as a section of the treasury and opposition benche demanding that “media corruption” be also inquired into by Lokpal, Mulayam went on to state that it had become a practice for electronic channels to collect money during polls and air views in support of one party.

Have the first shots been fired in a war between News Corp and Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd?

The Sunday Times article has, however, been unavailable to readers because of paper’s paywall and because newspapers which subscribe to The Sunday Times syndication service have refrained from running it.

Below is the full text of the article, carried without the permission of the publishers. And in the dock is not just ToI but Hindi heavyweights like Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran and Aaj, the first two of whom are listed on the stock exchanges.

The Indian government has condemned a rise in so-called “paid news”, in which newspapers and television channels accept money to run favourable articles about politicians, companies and celebrities.

The move by Ambika Soni, the broadcasting minister, follows a damaging report commissioned by the Press Council of India, which revealed that the practise of playing for positive coverage in the Indian media was widespread.

Soni, who proposed a new body to regulate broadcasting, said the phenomenon was undermining the credibility of new reports. “The paid news issue does not crop up during the elections but at other times as well,” she said.

The Press Council report criticised newspapers and broadcasters that demand money from politicians to run sympathetic stories about them. It said some papers misrepresent paid-for advertising as news and enter “private treaties” with companies that guarantee favourable coverage in exchange for free shares.

The report quoted a long list of politicians who disclosed that newspaper had asked them to pay large sums to write about their campaigns during state elections in 2009.

Harmohan Dhawan, a former aviation minister, was told that if he wanted coverage, he would have to pay two local newspapers, Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, up to one million rupees (£13,600) each.

“Representatives of the print medium came to me and asked for money. They said their newspapers (would) give coverage if I paid them money. They offered a ‘package’ to me and in one such package I was told editorials would be written in my favour,” he said.

The story was echoed by Santosh Singh, a candidate for the ruling Congress party in Uttar Pradesh, who said he had been offered packages costing up to one million rupees by the Dainik Jagran and Aaj newspapers.

“The representatives of these newspapers who me said they were merely following orders given to them by their managements,” he said.

The Press Council report also highlighted the role of Medianet, a company created Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, which publishes The Times of India, The Economic Times and a range of other leading titles.

Medianet, for a price, openly offers to send journalists to cover launches or personality-related events, or arranges “news stories” based on a particular product to appear in the newspaper supplements.

A Sunday Times reporter telephoned Medianet last week posing as the public relations agent of a company wanting coverage for a party at Emporio, an exclusive shopping mall in Delhi.

Chandru Sambasivan, the head of Medianet’s Delhi office, said space could be bought in the Delhi Times supplement, the Times‘ society pages, for £27 a centimetre on the front page, of £16 inside.

He said it could “definitely” be dressed up as a genuine news story, as along it met a “celebrity quotient”. Celebrities were available to attend the event at an extra cost, he said.

“Once you are able to share it (the launch product) with us, we could always build a story around it and make an interesting article for the readers,” he said. “Basically, if you are looking at a launch, then it can go on ‘launch pad’, on page 3 of Delhi Times.”

Sambasivan confirmed that the latest launch pad feature, in which Katrina Kaif, the Bollywood star, promoted Uni-ball pens, had been paid for by a marketing company. The article, which has no writer’s name attached, does not make clear that it was sponsored.

In it, Kaif, 26, gushed: “I’m excited about being the face of a youthful, high-quality, international brand, which I have personally grown up with in the UK; and I particularly love Uni-Jetstream, which I think is the smoothest pen in the world.”

Ravi Dhariwal, the chief executive of The Times of India, said yesterday: “There is no paid in news in any of our main papers and titles. We do have advertising and promotional supplements which sometimes carry paid features.”

The practice of “paid news” has been widely criticised.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, one of the authors of Press Council report, said adverts posing as new were “cheating” readers.

The election commission of India likes to pretend that it came to know of the phenomenon of “paid news”—advertisements being slipped in under the garb of news to circumvent expenditure norms— only after recent reports of its widespread use during the 2009 recent general elections.

Well, here’s more news for the EC.

A journalist with Citizen Matters, a civic awareness magazine published from Bangalore, writes that she was offered money to write about candidates from three mainstream political parties contesting elections to the civic body in India’s IT capital.

Vaishnavi Vittal writes that an aide of a first-time candidate in ward no. 177 (J.P. Nagar) tried to slip her a bunch of 100-rupee notes neatly folded in his palm. “Nimma expenditurege (for your expenditure), madam”, he said sheepishly. Less than an hour later, in the same ward, another candidate pulled out wads of 500-rupee notes from his pocket and asked me, “Hana yenadaru kodabeka? (Should we pay you any money?)”

“A similar incident occurred with a party candidate contesting from Sarakki (Ward 178). After the interview, the candidate’s spouse and campaign coordinator repeatedly asked me if they need to pay me for the interview. They went on to add, laughing all the while, that they are ready to pay money even if we don’t ask for it.

“The two of them gave me a copy of a local Kannada publication in which there were several reports, profiling some of the candidates. They told me that they had paid for a report on their party candidate on the front page.”

The Times of India may have made many sterling contributions to Indian journalism in the first 150 years of its existence, but its chief claim to fame in the last 21 years has been to blur the distinction between editorial and advertisement to the extent of rendering the former irrelevant to journalism.

The Times is, of course, free to do what it pleases. But when the market leader with a stranglehold on circulation and advertising revenue sets such a low editorial benchmark, it leaves little room for “serious” players invested in journalism when confronted by advertisers accustomed to the red-carpet treatment.

Either they have to swallow their pride and follow the leader hoping no one will notice—or risk losing the advertising and falling by the wayside.

A good example is yesterday’s Deccan Herald, the Bangalore based single-City newspaper that was trounced by ToI in its lair over a decade ago and is now facing fresh competition for the No.2 slot from new entrants like DNA and Deccan Chronicle .

DH carries a half-page advertisement for “affordable premium homes” launched by the listed company Puravankara on page 1, and follows up with a news story on the “good response” to the advertiser’s project on page 4 with prose straight from the advertiser’s brochure.

Only the naive would contend that this is the first time an advertiser has taken an expensive ad on the promise of positive coverage in the news columns, but….

TheWall Street Journal‘s bureau chief in India, Paul Beckett, has a major piece on the rampant corruption in the Indian media in the ongoing election coverage, with advertising masquerading as news for a fee, and neither readers nor voters being told about the deal.

Brokers, he writes, are offering package deals for coverage in newspapers, for front-page pictures, for interviews, for printing press releases verbatim, etc.

Thankfully, he reassures us that “the best-known English-language dailies typically don’t do it so blatantly”.

Beckett quotes the former chief election commissioner N. Gopalaswami as saying that he had heard of newspapers having a rate card for positive coverage and another for not negative coverage, and that this is not something that can be ignored.

“The nation’s newspapers usually play either vigilante cop exposing wrongdoing in the public interest (on a good day, at a few publications) or spineless patsy killing stories on the orders of powerful advertisers. Many papers also engage in practices that cross the ethical line between advertising and editorial in a way that is opaque, if not downright obscure, to readers.

“But it is of another order of magnitude to see reporters, editors and newspaper owners holding the democratic process to ransom. A free (in every sense) press is an integral part of a vibrant democracy. A corrupt press is both symptom and perpetrator of a rotten democracy.”

The second season of Indian Premier League (IPL), the shotgun wedding of cricket, cinema, celebrity, cheesecake, and commerce, is now into its second week in South Africa, but its influence is alrady being felt not just on the way cricket is played but on the way cricket is covered on the sports pages.

The table, above, is from the 29 April issue of the New Delhi edition of The Times of India.

It carries the names of four of the IPL teams as christened by their owners (Mumbai Indians, Kings’s XI Punjab, Knight Riders, Royal Challengers) . But, mysteriously or perhaps not so mysteriously, it refers to the other four teams by their cities (Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur and Chennai).

ToI’s reluctance to name “Team Hyderabad”, which is owned by Deccan Chronicle, is somewhat understandable: it may not want to give “free publicity” to a key competitors in the South. But what of the remaining three? The Chennai team is owned by India Cements; the Delhi team by the infrastructure company GMR; and the Jaipur team is part-owned by Lachlan Murdoch and the actress Shilpa Shetty.

Should business interests prevent newspapers, magazines, TV stations from naming teams owned by competitors? Even if business interests prevent ToI from naming teams, why the preferential treatment for the other four?